Image by Simon Pynt
The scent of hot, buttery popcorn and anticipation fills the air as an expectant crowd queues down Barrack Street. Lamps fade to darkness and silence falls as the thick velvet curtain draws back, a fanfare plays, the projector fluttering into life and flooding the theatre with faces, stories and voices from places far and wide. Transporting, imaginative, and affecting – the magic of cinema.
Between 1954 and 1997 The Liberty Theatre had many identities, and hosted a plethora of films ranging from art house, to European foreign language, to Chinese martial arts. After 25 years laying dormant, STRUT Dance are throwing open the doors and inviting audiences to explore this labyrinthine Gold Rush era building that has endured where so many others have fallen. Standing quietly on Barrack St, nestled within the heart of Perth City, The Liberty Theatre is bursting with untold stories, charming character, and limitless potential. Eight exciting, vibrant, new creative teams occupy, transform and reimagine this historic site and the memories within it, leading audiences on a journey through spaces old and new.
Each work in SITU-8: CITY has been created in response to a key element from a film, reimagining it to speak to the artists’ identities, contemplating the world that they want to live in now and in the future. These works are the result of rigorous, new partnerships between exceptional Australian choreographers and composers selected by STRUT Dance and Tura. Through their diverse range of responses to this provocation, these eight dynamic works examine how stories, bodies, voices and characters have been included and excluded from The Liberty Theatre, and the history of cinema. These works are fearless, dynamic, gutsy, and not to be missed.
SITU-8: CITY features new performance works by Antonio Rinaldi and Celina Hage, Bobby Russell, Daisy Sanders, Olivia Hendry and Kimberley Parkin, Sam Coren, Sarah Aiken, Talitha Maslin, and Tom Mullane; with original compositions by Alice Humphries, David Stewart and Nonie Trainor, Em Burrows, Eduardo Cossio, Felicity Groom, Louis Frere-Harvey, Peter McAvan, and Randa Khamis.
2022 curators: Sofie Burgoyne and Timothy Green with assistance from Ashleigh White.
1 - 11 November
The Liberty Theatre